


Silver Bells and Leather Gloves

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Christmas, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 21:01:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2746928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a busy time on an alien planet as Koschei and Theta find themselves in the middle of a human winter festival.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silver Bells and Leather Gloves

The first time they went to Earth, it was winter, and it was cold.

They landed outside a multi-story edifice, on a brick street lined with similar buildings. The TT capsule they'd stolen decided to masquerade as a closed warm-nut stand, which Theta thought hilarious, refusing to explain the joke to Koschei. The air hummed with the noise of sentient beings at the work of living: incomprehensible conversations echoed around the narrow artificial valley, footsteps accented the bustle, and somewhere, someone was ringing a very small bell. Koschei was too disoriented to tell where, but it twinkled in the aural landscape like stars seen from a planet's surface, the kaleidoscope effect of atmosphere turning roaring, self-sustaining furnaces into gems, jewels, astronomical frippery. The sound carried, high above all the rest, twinned or perhaps tripled. Koschei peered through the crowd, and along the row of buildings, trying to localise it. All around them, people hurried by in their Earth finery, felted coats and knit sweaters and brightly-coloured scarves. He shivered, eyeing their warm clothes enviously. It had been summer on Gallifrey when they'd departed, summer on a double-starred world, and their light tunics and trousers felt woefully inadequate against the frigid air and the oppressive, grey-white sky. The Earth people, in their winter clothes, didn't seem to notice. Almost all of them carried heavily-laden paper bags, printed with words that, though the capsule translated the sounds, had no meaning to the two travellers. Names, Koschei decided, but of what?

"Stores!" Theta said excitedly, charging headlong into the throng. Koschei, of whose hand Theta had a firm though oblivious hold, was forced to follow, stumbling over the cobblestones underfoot. He found himself over the threshold of the largest building, basking in a blast of hot air.

He would have congratulated Theta on the good idea of ducking into the building, and berated him on the bad idea of setting these particular co-ordinates, but no sooner had he caught his breath than his friend was leading him deeper into the store. It appeared to be a busy indoor marketplace. Merchants stood behind stalls drowning in goods: jewellery, fragrant oils, children's toys, and lots and lots of warm clothing, in every colour imaginable. Many more people walked from stall to stall, inspecting these traders' wares. The noise of humanity was much worse here, possibly because they were all competing with the loud, repetitive and disturbingly cheerful music that filled the large space, seeming to come from everywhere at once. Koschei winced, tempted to put his hands over his ears in pain, or tuck them into his armpits, terrified someone would accidentally touch him.

"Koschei--" He suddenly realised that Theta was tugging at his elbow, trying to pull him towards a particularly dense crowd. "Koscheeei, come on!"

With a long-suffering sigh, he followed. Theta's attention went everywhere at once, darting from artefact to alien to artefact as he moved about the store. Koschei, in contrast, concentrated on shutting out the nauseating music and not losing Theta in the crush as he surged ahead.

"Isn't this amazing?" Theta babbled. "To think that a few dozen millennia ago, these creatures were swinging about in trees, walking on their knuckles, no language, no theory of mind to speak of, almost no culture at all, certainly no agriculture or industry, and now look at them! Shopping! Christmas! It's brilliant! Twenty, thirty thousand of their years. That's nothing. It would be a few generations on Gallifrey. What was happening on our world twenty-five thousand years ago? Exactly the same thing as what's happening there now. Koschei, try these on."

He hadn't really been listening, and he wondered if he had missed something, before concluding that it was merely one of Theta's mercurial and angular changes in train of thought. He jerked his head up--he'd been staring rather fixedly at the tiled floor in an attempt to stop looking at the dizzyingly alien horde--to see a display full of gloves, and Theta holding a pair. They were solid black, not the busy patterns of many of the others, and made of animal hide. When Koschei didn't move, Theta reached down to lay a palm on his wrist. He encircled it and brought it up to table level. Koschei, his wits finally catching up to him, held his hands out obediently. With what Koschei imagined was a parental air, Theta slipped first one, then the other glove onto his hands. No one had ever done this before, even when he had been a child. Young Time Lords to-be were expected to dress themselves, buckle their own boots, fasten their own robes.

They fit perfectly, of course. Theta had always had a good eye for this sort of visual-spatial task, and Koschei expected no less of him. They were also extremely comfortable. Lined as they were with some sort of knit material, they hugged his fingers snugly, but, because they were so very soft, did not restrict his motion at all. They did not stop him from feeling Theta's fingers tighten softly around his. He shivered again, although the gloves had warmed him immediately.

He smiled at Theta. "They're good, Thete. I'll keep them forever."

"Well, they might not fit your next regeneration," Theta demurred. Then he frowned.

"I'll keep them for the rest of this body, then." Still, Theta frowned, eyes on their hands, gloved ones resting in un-gloved. "What's the matter?"

Theta looked up at last, his eyebrows raised. "We need money."

Which was simple enough, once Theta told Koschei a bit about Earth's fiscal system, and they found a money-dispensing machine in the lobby for Koschei to hack. There was a dodgy moment when an impatient-looking woman stood waiting in line behind them, but she'd tired of the delay and bustled away again, after Theta had leaned in very close to try to help. Money acquired, they returned to the glove-seller to make their purchase, and walked away feeling rather proud of themselves.

Outside, it had begun to snow. For a moment, Koschei and Theta stood under the store awning, watching the flakes fall, large and lazy. They had begun to gather in the nooks and ledges of the open street, something they'd never seen on Gallifrey, where the dome sheltered the Citadel from all extremes of weather, where the rest of the planet had no streets, no towns, only isolated Houses nestled within the mountains. It softened the buildings and whitened the space between the cobblestones.

Beside them, a man in a red suit swung a little bell back and forth. Koschei saw some of the humans hurrying by drop coins into the cauldron by his side. They all looked the happier for it. He took the remainder of the money, still in Theta's pocket, and gave it to the bell man as well.

"Merry Christmas," the human said, nodding his thanks.

When he turned back, Theta was smiling, not his broad, isn't-the-universe-marvelous grin; a quiet smile, the sort you smile at someone close, when it's snowing, and they make you feel warm. He put his arm around Koschei, pulled him in to lean against his side, head on his shoulder. The man in the red suit glanced at his timepiece, lowered his bell, and raised his head to the sky, eyes closed. From somewhere above them came the sound of much larger, deeper bells, playing a resonant melody. Koschei closed his eyes, too, wrapped in his new, perfect gloves, the circle of Theta's arm, and a feeling of inordinate well-being, of good. With Theta there, it was easy to forget they stood on an alien world, among aliens. It was winter, and it wasn't cold at all.


End file.
